PUBLIC ART: Masterpieces for the masses

Boulder City allocates $60,000 a year to the arts for next five years

Most cities have a fair amount of public art, which serves the purpose of beautifying, enlightening and gentrifying. It's easy when thinking of public art in Las Vegas to think solely of the giant kitsch and classical reproductions on the Strip, but residents know that is by far not the whole story.

Tucked away in the assorted neighborhoods of the valley, there is art to be found and enjoyed. Some is easier to find than others and some stretch the definition of what is commonly perceived of as art, but there's more of it than most folks would imagine and public art is definitely a growing concern in the valley.

Recently, Boulder City decided to allocate $60,000 per year to the arts for the next five years.

Since 2002, the state has had a master plan that includes landscaping aesthetic improvements as appropriate when working on capacity expansion projects. Up to 3 percent of a project's budget can be utilized for this, which has resulted in sculptures, landscaping and murals at several key points in the valley.

"Well, what you call murals, I think of as aesthetic treatment on a closed abutment," said Jim Souba, Nevada Department of Transportation assistant director of engineering. "I'm an engineer."

Patrick Gaffey, cultural program supervisor for Clark County, said "Public Art can be just about anything if you have a professional artist working on it," although how one defines "professional" is still up for debate.

Even hiring a professional doesn't guarantee that a piece will be embraced by the public. Readers whose memories stretch all the way back to 2001 will remember the Ground Zero sculpture, which for eight years clung to the wall of city hall like so much abstract Plexiglas ivy.

Among the reasons Boulder City shows up so often near or at the top of the list for best places to live in the country may be because it is a city that has embraced public art. In fact, the city is in the midst of a yearlong celebration of public art, the Boulder City Art Scape. It's hard to look around the city and not see public art.

Among the permanent installations are the monuments at the Southern Nevada Veterans Memorial Cemetery, and prominent among those is a piece by Steven Liguori titled simply the Veterans Memorial Monument.

You've no doubt seen Liguri's work. In fact, his ninth piece chronicling the thirty-oners, the people who moved to Nevada in 1931 to work on the Hoover Dam, was unveiled on Oct. 2. Liguori is one of the few sculptors whose work is on prominent display in the greater Las Vegas area who actually is a native Nevadan.

Thousands of tourists a day see his High Scaler sculpture at the Hoover Dam. His sculptures accurately represent the people who toiled and persevered against great odds to build one of the engineering wonders of the world and to make the city what it is today.

High Scaler captures Joe Kine, one of the last surviving practitioners of that dangerous job.

But, Liguori's work isn't all about the glorious jobs. His first commissioned work for the city was of an unnamed sanitation worker whose difficult and unpleasant duty was to clean the latrines.

His first commissioned work in the city, however, was the piece in the cemetery; in fact, it was his first commissioned work at all. The pieces in the cemetery are not technically called sculptures, they're monuments.

They came into creation through a complex process involving a proposal, usually by a veterans group, and a juried selection of art. Liguori made his first commission just under the wire.

"I didn't know where I was supposed to go with my proposal," said Liguori. He finally found out where he needed to be, but the deadline was minutes away.

"I was told if I could get there in 10 minutes, they'd look at my proposal," he said. Obviously, he made it.

The piece itself is interesting in how it differs from virtually all his other work. His inspiration was two-fold -- he had recently heard about Double Negative, a large earthworks sculpture near Overton that dealt with negative space and the haunting image of John Kennedy Jr. saluting his father's coffin. The result was the Veterans Memorial Monument.